Over the years, digital content has gained increasing popularity with consumers. With the ever-growing amount of digital content available to consumers through the Internet using computers, smart phones, and other sources, consumers have access to a vast amount of content. Furthermore, many devices (e.g., smartphones) and services are readily available that allow consumers to capture and generate digital images.
The process of inpainting involves reconstructing lost or deteriorated parts of images and videos. Specifically, restoration algorithms are applied to replace portions of an image. A user, for example, may wish to remove one or more regions within an image containing objects or defects. Some inpainting techniques involve filling in the restoration region in the image by searching for similar patches in a nearby source region of the image and then copying the pixels from the most similar patch into the restoration region.